RAP Common

Client-side widget recycling

RWT introduces a mechanism that helps to soften the massive memory consumption on the client.
Many of the client-side widget are not thrown away anymore, but kept in an object pool for later reuse.
Especially with long-running applications in the Internet Explorer browser, this can make a huge difference.
The pooling does not include all RWT widgets now, so there is still potential for further optimization.

Please note that this topic is work in progress and, despite extensive testing, might lead to errors under rare circumstances.
If you experience any inexplicable behavior, please let us know.

RWT

New Table features

The Table widget now notifies about double-click events by sending a SelectionListener#widgetDefaultSelected.

The column order can be queried and changed programmatically using getColumnOrder() and setColumnOrder(). Marking a column with setMoveable permits the user to change its order by drag and drop.

If a table is created with the SWT.VIRTUAL flag, TableItems are only realized client-side when they become visible. Even though, in most situations, using the TableViewer will be more convenient, the code below shows how the SetData event can be used to "manually" populate a VIRTUAL table.

With the new CLabel widget you can now have images and text on your label without any workaround. Additionally you can set different border styles like SWT.SHADOW_IN or SWT.SHADOW_OUT. Here is an example how it could look like:

Cool stuff

By reimplementing the CoolItem and CoolBar widget we got many improvements in this area. First is that support of multiple rows in the CoolBar which is used if there is not enough space to show all the items in one row.

Additionally if there is not enough space to wrap the CoolItems a chevron will be visible to have access to the invisible items.

Theming enhancements

The RAP theming infrastructure allows for further customizations of the UI.
It is now possible to specify borders, paddings, fonts, and images in a custom theme file.
Even custom widgets can now hook their theming into RAP via extension point.

RAP JFace

TableViewer

As the underlying RWT Table now understands the VIRTUAL flag, the relevant TableViewer code was activated as well. Below you can see how it looks in action.

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Databinding

Main functionalty of org.eclipse.jface.databinding has been ported to RAP.
You can see databinding in action in the newly added perspective 'Databinding' in the RAP Demo application. Note that the databinding demo comes as a seperate plugin called org.eclipse.rap.demo.databinding which has to be started together with the regular workbench demo application.

Here is a screenshot:

RAP Workbench

DrillDownAdapter

Drilldown Adapters are a feature available for TreeViewers to help navigate through the data, instead of having to deal with ever expanding trees. In this way you can essentially zoom in to view just one part of the tree, i.e., drill down. Only two lines of code were added throughout the initialization of the viewer to invoke this feature in the context menu. Only one line was needed to add them to the view's toolbar. They are shown below:

// Create the Drill Down Adapter
drillDownAdapter = new DrillDownAdapter(viewer);
// Add the options to the view's toolbar (IToolBarManager)
drillDownAdapter.addNavigationActions(manager);

After adding them to the IToolbarManager of your view, they are looking like this:

The above features are just the ones that are new since the previous milestone build. Summaries for earlier milestone builds: